It's graduate fellowship application season. I won the NSF and NDSEG in Machine Learning last year, but never knew if I was "doing it right" and I felt underprepared and demotivated. To help fewer people feel that way, I've posted my application materials: drive.google.com/drive/folders/…
My biggest advice is to make every single sentence relate to the fellowship criteria. To help with this, I designed a new template for the NSF essay that makes it completely clear the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts of each experience.
The equivalent to this for the NDSEG is to spend time at the beginning making it totally obvious why the DoD should care about your research. I spent almost a page on this, before even mentioning anything technical.
If you feel unqualified or don't have any publications: don't worry, and still apply! Show your research potential with a clear proposal that cites recent, relevant work. Don't feel bad about discussing your personal situation: fellowships fund people, not projects.
And I would be remiss if I didn't mention those who very kindly helped me develop my application: @HanieSedghi, @CAISplusplus, Shaddin Dughmi, David Kempe, @saroberts, Cari Martinez, and most of all @PreetumNakkiran. Thank you!
Unsure if people still use hashtags but hopefully this will increase visibility of my posted materials; it seems like most websites that collate NSF essays are now defunct. #NSFGRFP #GRFP #NSF #NDSEG #Fellowships #AcademicChatter
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